A Healthy Diet & Pie Charts

This week, we're looking at food and diet in more detail. I was surprised to find out the girls didn't know what the word diet meant! I assumed they already did from our work on herbivores, omnivores and carnivores - but looking back, I guess I didn't use it?? At least it was simple enough to explain in that context now. 😂

We talked about foods being made up of different things and how our bodies use those things for different things, e.g. carbohydrates are mainly for energy so we can move about, proteins are for growing and healing, calcium for strong bones and teeth, vitamins and minerals for keeping us healthy/not get ill, fats for storing energy and keeping warm (they remembered about calcium and fats from previous weeks 👍).

We pointed out which kinds of food we were eating at mealtimes over a couple of days and talked about whether we were being healthy or not.

We also talked about the importance of water and the things our bodies need it for, e.g. blood, urine, sweat, healthy skin - and why we should replace all the water lost by drinking more (why do you think you feel thirstier during exercise? M said because it makes the heart pump faster so your blood needs to be able to move around easier, which I thought was interesting! I linked it to maybe because your blood is moving around more it's picking up more waste so you're making more urine... Maybe, I don't know! Then I asked them what happens when they exercise, wiping my brow as a clue, and F shouted "sweat!", so I then explained how sweat cools your body down by taking heat with it when it evaporates, i.e. dries up).

We then read the relevant pages in the book "Keeping Me Healthy" and stopped on the double page spread of the food groups:

I gave the girls an A3 piece of coloured paper each and explained they were going to make their own diagram by drawing around a plate and using a ruler for the straight lines (I marked the centre of their circle with a dot to help them). This was a good task for estimation, since they were copying the segment sizes from the diagram in the book, and also fine motor skills in lining up the ruler correctly! They then labelled each segment and coloured it in (with wax crayons) before drawing examples of foods on a separate piece of white paper, cutting and sticking in the right place. I chose for them to do it this way to further practise their estimation and spatial awareness skills, making sure the drawing they did would fit into the segment!

We labelled the smallest segment as "fats" instead of "butters and spreads" and talked a bit more about how too many fatty foods aren't good for you (the sugar in sweet foods like biscuits and cakes is turned into energy like carbohydrates, but some of it is also stored in the body as fat which is why these foods also belong in this section). It's ok to eat them now and again, but compared to the other foods we eat they should be a lot less! Then I wrote the purposes of each food group on the whiteboard and they needed to copy the correct caption under the correct label - they colour coded their labels to match the segment to make their diagrams clearer. 👌

Finally, I explained to them that this kind of diagram can also be called a "pie chart" and is used for showing proportions of something. We linked this to their work on fractions and drew some simple fractions as pie charts on the whiteboard. Then I asked them to estimate what each segment of their healthy diet diagrams was as a fraction. Finally, I gave them a maths worksheet on pie charts to complete.